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HITLER'S Table Talk comes
from the original Bormann Vermerke which the late
François Genoud purchased from Bormann's widow
Gerda Bormann. They were actually typed from notes
taken by the stenographer Heinrich Heim, whom I
interviewed and who confirmed the procedure in detail. Each
day's entry was initialled by Bormann at the end. They are
genuine, in the first person, and highly
reliable.

2. Henry Picker took over as
Bormann's secretary/adjutant from Heim. He found a lot of
Heim's notes in his desk and rewrote them in reported speech
and published them and his own notes as Hitlers
Tischgespräche. Good, but less reliable.

3. After the war, Genoud obtained
by a very complex process notes on the final
Bunkergespräche of Hitler. Walter Funk was
involved. When I visited Geneva in about 1968 (Elke
Fröhlich, the Goebbels expert, was with me) Genoud
showed us a sheaf of US legal-size paper, closely typed in
German. Nobody has ever seen that sheaf since. Hugh
Trevor-Roper had published them in English in the late
1950s as Hitler's Last Testament. In interviews with
me, Hitler's adjutants, especially Karl-Jesko von
Puttkamer (on left of picture) disputed their
authenticity. Eventually Genoud, meeting me in Paris, came
clean and told me he had either written, or enlarged on, the
originals himself, in his own handwriting -- in French. On
two different occasions he said to me, apologetically, "That
is surely what Hitler would have said."

This explains a number of
anachronisms in the text of this latter volume. It also
explains why Genoud originally insisted that Hoffmann &
Campe, who in the 1970s had a contract to publish the
Trevor-Roper edition in German, must work from the French
text(!); I told them I had seen a German text in Genoud's
hands when I visited him in Geneva. That firm then abandoned
the project, and the book was published by Albrecht Knaus of
Bertelsmann Verlag.

4. One day I bumped into Genoud in
Paris, or we met by arrangement, I can't recall, and he gave
me a complete photocopy of the Bunker conversations (1945)
in German; they are heavily expanded between the lines in
handwriting -- his handwriting, and I suspect his
typewriter. Useless as a historical source. I donated them
to the Institut für Zeitgeschichte.

5. One final detail: the English
translation of the original Hitler's Table Talk was
published in about 1949 by George Weidenfeld, who paid a
huge sum for the rights -- half to Genoud, and half at
Genoud's insistence to Paula Hitler. The Weidenfeld
translation is idiomatic and excellent. I read the book as a
boy, enthralled. I used the text on several occasions in my
book Hitler's War: for that I was denounced as a "falsifier
of history", as I preferred the idiomatic Weidenfeld
translation to a wooden, turgid, and sludge-like
Richard
Evans translation as
offered to the High Court during the Lipstadt
Trial. Remember that
whenever you see newspapers refer to me as having been
exposed as a "falsifier" of documents.